Newegg internal HDD: "Limit 1 per customer". WTF?

Newegg was offering a 3TB Hitachi drive for around $230ish the other day, and you could buy 50. I don't quite remember the price before the flood, but seems reasonable, and at the same time many 2TB drives on the site were selling for more.

If you're on Newegg's mailing list, might want to check your inbox. They sent a mail to me explicitly about mechanical HDDs. Looks like the 1/person limit is being eased a bit and they have what appears to be a decent Samsung Spinpoint promo that brings a 1TB 7200 RPM disk down to $109.99.

I bought a 2TB Samsung disk from Newegg last week. Sure it did cost me $200, but at the same time it came with a free Seagate GoFlex Satellite disk (500GB) which is retailing for ~$200 by itself. So I don't feel too bad about that price. But even without the freebie I still would have bought the disk as I want to have a shelf-spare for my NAS I have at home (and I want it to match what I already have).

You only get "gouged" if you absolutely *have* to buy one, and given the shortage, I would think you'd rather pay 2x the lowest price they reached at some point rather than not be able to buy one at all because someone "stockpiled" a bunch because they didn't want the inconvenience of having to order for a while.

Marketplaces are complex entities driven primarily by price, and who can pay it. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference between the effects of supply and demand versus the effects of gouging, in part because no marketplace is 100% free in its operations, due to tariffs, stockpiling, related-materials-or-processes price rises, but mostly due to commodities traders attempting to game the system.

Trying to figure out how come consumer gasoline prices rise or fall is akin to crystal ball gazing. Sometimes, an event that seems certain to raise the price of a barrel of oil doesn't raise consumer gasoline prices, and other times, similar events do. And trader emotions play into all of it.

After the summer-fall monsoon floods in Thailand, all but the biggest buyers were screwed, price-wise when buying platter hard drives. Was there some gouging going on? I don't know, but I bet there was.

John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September. About 60 other companies that produce hard drives and components were flooded, he said.

The challenges facing all flood-affected companies in Thailand are apparent during a drive through the Nava Nakorn industrial zone. Rotting furniture and rusted file cabinets are strewn outside a Panasonic factory. Workers brought in from Cambodia are cleaning up — dredging filthy drainage ditches and cleaning up trash in front of a JVC facility. But more than a month after the last puddles of floodwater dried in the tropical sun, parts of Nava Nakorn, which means “new city,” still resemble a municipal dump. Large piles of garbage bags sit beside roads fissured and potholed by the floods.

Good article. The rubbish strewn everywhere is just how where I live was like up until about ten days ago. Nava Nakorn was hit a lot, lot worse than our area ever was, at least our water and power continued to function throughout. Talking to Thai people since the flood and every single one believes flooding like this will occur again. One man I know, his family had a very nice house, never flooded in 40 years but damaged very badly this time. People aren't replacing everything that was damaged, just the essentials, and only items that can easily be shifted to a higher floor.

I'll try and get over to Nava Nakorn next week to see for myself how things look. Still waiting after seven weeks to get my car repaired from the flooding...

The news in that NY Times article is not good for Thailand, electronics manufacturers, or DIY PC consumers. It is saying that maybe by the end of 2012, certain hard drive models will be priced at pre-flood levels. And their new monsoon season starts in May.

FWIW, drives are still more expensive than they were a year ago, but not as expensive as they were three months ago.

When I built this box, a 500GB drive was $100 from Amazon. I returned that because vw posted the BB deal. But now you can get a 1TB drive for $120, so while supply is certainly constrained, it's not as bad as people thought it was going to be.

Good to hear from you again, MBK. Sounds like Thailand can't catch a break. I thought 3 to 6 months was a little optimistic, based on the pictures and media. I'm betting no one there is anxious for May to come around. Hopefully, it will be a fraction of the last monsoon.

At least for my portal, Dell has restricted all 500 GB drives and larger from Latitude E-series and if I want a 320GB drive, I can either get it as a 5400 RPM drive or a 7200 RPM drive with hardware encryption-- not plain vanilla 7200 RPM. I had them rescind quotes that were outstanding-- they said they couldn't honor them because they weren't getting any parts.

Yeowch.

Apple has gone the other direction with 15-17" MacBook Pros. If you want a spinning platter, you want 750GB. I'm not sure how much that is reactionary and how much is "let's drive the consumer to where we want the consumer to be" but that's another price/performance hurdle.

John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September.

Maybe it's time to geographically diversify the manufacturing base a bit. How about to an area that doesn't have a monsoon climate and history of earthquakes?

John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September.

Maybe it's time to geographically diversify the manufacturing base a bit. How about to an area that doesn't have a monsoon climate and history of earthquakes?

John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September.

Maybe it's time to geographically diversify the manufacturing base a bit. How about to an area that doesn't have a monsoon climate and history of earthquakes?

It occurs to me that most of LEAN manufacturing and JIT have "cheap energy" as an underlying assumption.

John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September.

Maybe it's time to geographically diversify the manufacturing base a bit. How about to an area that doesn't have a monsoon climate and history of earthquakes?

And cheap labor.

Indeed, the HDD industry has followed a particular path, based largely on a particular point on the evolving cost-vs.-skill level curve. Over the last 50 years, HDD production assembly has gone from USA -> Japan -> Singapore -> Thailand -> Malaysia -> China. The higher-level countries on that path often still do R&D and technical work, but they're not cost effective enough for mass production, barring a few low-volume high-margin products. At this point Thailand still holds the bulk of the production, with Malaysia up-and-coming, but AFAIK the attempts at production in mainland China have not yet met with much success.

I'm starting to see Dell take advantage of the situation to gouge and/or sell more warranties.

For example, we just had a SAS3g 300g 15k hard drive die in an older equallogic ps5000. For just that 1 drive, Dell quoted me $2,300. In the same email, they quoted me $2,200 to put it under warranty and receive a new drive.

I'm starting to see Dell take advantage of the situation to gouge and/or sell more warranties.

For example, we just had a SAS3g 300g 15k hard drive die in an older equallogic ps5000. For just that 1 drive, Dell quoted me $2,300. In the same email, they quoted me $2,200 to put it under warranty and receive a new drive.

Refuckingdiculious.

You're far from the first person to report this sort of behavior, and I hope it bites them in the ass when it comes time for people to replace their arrays. We're looking at buying one (our first non-DAS storage), and I flat-out rejected our Dell rep's offer to pitch a solution, based on their behavior in this situation. Like hell I'm going with a vendor that I know will happily F me in the A in a situation like this. Say what you want about the quality of HP support, but replacement server drives from them cost pretty much what they did six months ago.

At least for my portal, Dell has restricted all 500 GB drives and larger from Latitude E-series and if I want a 320GB drive, I can either get it as a 5400 RPM drive or a 7200 RPM drive with hardware encryption-- not plain vanilla 7200 RPM. I had them rescind quotes that were outstanding-- they said they couldn't honor them because they weren't getting any parts.

I hate to say nice things about Dell, but the laptop finally showed up, about a month later than it should have (and granted some of that was our purchasing department struggling with re-issuing the quote). It had a 7200 RPM, 500 GB drive, and I wasn't alerted that they were subbing the original drive back in.

Oh well, I'll probably never say nice things about HP, so maybe that's one small victory. I'm still expecting a 4-5 week lead time on Dell hardware though, when it's usually 7 days or less.

My IBM service tech reported last week that, at the moment, he is not allowed to locally stock the same spare disks that he normally would. So rather than grabbing one from the local office and getting me fixed up in a couple of hours to adding a day to that process.

In some cases it's cheaper to buy a retail external drive and pull the drive. I bought 1.5TB in a WD enclosure for $119 (plus free iPhone headset) and just swapped the drives. Originally just wanted to do a bare drive upgrade, but it would have cost much more.

Pulled from an external? No warranty-- you just voided it. It's also typically going to be a 5400-5900 RPM drive. Now that may all be fine, and it may still constitute a good deal, just realize what's going on.

Edit: I was responding to new2mac. vwracer409 should retain the normal warranty obviously.

Pulled from an external? No warranty-- you just voided it. It's also typically going to be a 5400-5900 RPM drive. Now that may all be fine, and it may still constitute a good deal, just realize what's going on.

Edit: I was responding to new2mac. vwracer409 should retain the normal warranty obviously.

It has (had) a 1YR Warranty, which on HDDs is essentially meaningless. That said, the main reason for the swap was to get away from USB2. Finding a decent inexpensive FireWire enclosure has become pretty much hopeless. So I re-used what I had.